COBOL Installation for Outage Planning

Description:We have a question about the installation of COBOL for Aleph. We are planning for a significant outage in our primary data center to occur on October 24 and 25; the outage will make our production Aleph server unavailable for use for approximately 36 hours.

Our current Disaster Recovery strategy calls for us to use our test server during such a scenario. We have a mirrored file system configuration, so the idea (at the most basic level) is to break the mirror, etc, and mount the production database/files, etc, including everything in /exlibris, on our test server.

In the past, we have had some problems with COBOL license files being particular to an IP address. So we believe we cannot use the production COBOL installation for use in the test environment. (All other IP-specific references in the application have been replaced with domain name.) So we are considering moving the COBOL installation to a new file system on space local to that machine, using the same directory path structure, of course, so the symlinks elsewhere in /exlibris would not be disrupted. In other words, we would get all the production /exlibris files to use on our test server EXCEPT the /exlibris/product/COBOL, etc directory - which would be local to the machine.

Questions for you include the feasibility of moving or copying these files to different storage, or if we'd need to request that Ex Libris staff do this installation, other suggestions, etc.?

OIT staff have also asked about the possibility of doing this installation ourselves. PeopleSoft also uses COBOL and local staff have the permissions to install it where it fits with local structure and practice.

We welcome your advice here.

Resolution:Ex Libris does not think there is anything in /exlibris related to COBOL that is ip- or machine-specific.